


I dream of you (more often than I don’t)

by fandammit



Series: I exist in two places (here and where you are) [2]
Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: F/M, Longing from afar, Post-Crooked Kingdom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-06
Updated: 2016-10-15
Packaged: 2018-08-19 20:19:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8223569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fandammit/pseuds/fandammit
Summary: She never signed her letters with goodbye. Instead, she found other ways to remind him that she was gone -I miss feeding the crows at your windowsill.I miss the sound of the harbor late at night.I miss how the moonlight reflected off the rooftops.He only ever had one imagined reply to that, words he didn’t think he’d ever have the courage to speak aloud -I miss you.





	1. From where you are

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Sierra Demulder's poem, "Unrequited Love Poem"

He didn’t spend his time pining after her.

He built up the Crow Club and worked to open a new one. He made threats of violence and made good on them when necessary. He created opportunity and money where there had been none.

If he made sure to keep track of the weather on the seas, if he found himself staring at the windowsill in his office from time to time, if he walked the pier every night before heading back to the Slat, then it was only to keep track of business or to work out some plan in his head or to know how best to dupe the tourists that were disembarking.

His days were filled with commerce and cruelty, his mind too crowded with profits and planning to think of much else.

At night, though, his body betrayed him.

His dreams were filled with glimpses of Inej - her dark hair falling across her face, her eyes staring up at him in the moonlight, her hand sliding beneath his own. It was never the entirety of her - only fleeting slivers of memories, as though he were seeing her through the gaps in a fence.

He would wake, sweating and breathless and embittered, and think - at least let me have all of her in my dreams. He might never know the feel of her in his arms in his waking life, but to never know it in his dreams, too, was a more desperate, hopeless kind of ache.

On those nights, he could almost accept that the gods existed beyond some faithful’s imagination. He could believe they were real and had finally found a punishment cruel enough for the bastard of a boy called Dirtyhands.

* * *

She sat down to write the first letter two weeks after she had departed from her berth in Ketterdam. In the morning she would say goodbye to her parents and the Ravka shoreline. 

She sat in the captain’s cabin, her lamp turned down low to keep from bothering the sleeping form of her parents a few feet away. She stared at the piece of paper before her, hand poised above the emptiness, and hesitated.

How should she start? Dear Kaz? Hello, Kaz? Perhaps forego a greeting at all and just begin. She smiled. That’s what Kaz would do, his mind too quick and emotions too bothersome a thing to bother with formal greetings.

She shook her head at herself, scoffing at the useless, ridiculous thoughts chasing one another in her brain.

She wrote his name at the top of the sheet and stopped. Wondered how to begin.

It wasn’t as though she and Kaz had never spoken casually, but it had always began and couched in terms of a job - where they were headed, what they were doing, why he needed a certain bit of information. He was never one to ask how her day had been or what she had planned for the night. Although perhaps he’d never needed, then - her days and nights had almost always involved being with him.

She set her pen down and rolled her shoulders, easing the tension from her body. She sighed quietly, then started when she heard her father speak.

“Think of all the times you almost turned to him to speak something on your mind. Imagine all the things you wanted to say. Write those things down.”

She turned her head to face him, a shy, almost embarrassed look on her face.

“How do you know who I’m writing to?”

Her father sat up and laughed as he shook his head at her, a soft look coming into his eyes.

“Who else, Inej, if not the boy who brought us to you?”

Even now, those words - the simple truth behind them - still threw her off balance.

Or perhaps righted a world that had been long knocked askew.  

She slipped off the chair and walked silently over to the bed, sat next to him and laid her head on his shoulder. He wrapped his arm around her and she sank into his warmth, into a dream that she’d had a thousand times over, a dream that was no longer just a dream.

“You could come back with us, Inej,” her father murmured after a long moment. “There’s still a place for you among the caravans. You would have a full belly and an open road once again.”

Sorrow burrowed into her chest.

“But never an easy heart,” she replied quietly.

* * *

True to her word, she sent letters as often as she could.

He felt a pleasant wave of surprise every time he recognized her slight, trailing script on the front of an envelope - not that she kept her word, which he never doubted, but at the simple fact that they’d been spoken at all. They were reminders of goodness in his violence soaked world. They were evidence that she was not just a distant memory or a last, fading dream.

He never wrote back; his letters would only ever arrive at places she had already departed from. Instead, he built new images of her, hoarded the words he would never say in return.

_I bought a hat at the last port - a proper pirate hat._

Of course, he pictured himself saying. Can’t be a proper pirate without a proper pirate hat.

_The sea is more beautiful than I could’ve imagined. Deadlier, too._

It’s a fitting place for you then, his dream self would rasp, easy and unafraid in a way he never was in his waking hours. You both have that in common.

She never signed her letters with goodbye. Instead, she found other ways to remind him that she was gone -

_I miss feeding the crows at your windowsill._  
_I miss the sound of the harbor late at night.  
_ _I miss how the moonlight reflected off the rooftops._

He only ever had one imagined reply to that, words he didn’t think he’d ever have the courage to speak aloud -

I miss you.

* * *

She stared at herself in the mirror. Reflected back at her was a slight slip of a girl, hands clean, hair tied neatly back into a long plait.

She blinked and her hands red and dripping, her clothes soaked in someone else’s suffering. She wished the sight would make her fingers shake, but they laid still at either side of her. She wished that she could feel sick at the memory of slavers slumping forward, quietly, one by one. Instead, she felt at peace; in the quiet aftermath of the slaughter, they could have been penitents kneeling in prayer, were simply reeds bowing in the wind.

A rustle of sheets on her bed drew her from her morbid thoughts. A Suli girl, brown skinned and thin, sat up looking at her. Up close and out of the moonlit night, she was even younger than Inej had initially thought - younger than Inej herself had been when she’d been taken.

Inej walked over to her, a canteen of water in her hands. She sat at the edge of the bed and held the water out. The girl waited for a long moment before slowly edging her hand forward and taking the water. Inej stared at her - the wild, black tangle of her hair, the wide brown eyes. It felt like looking into a mirror that faced the past.

She waited until the girl was done drinking.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Kripa,” the girl replied, her voice no louder than a sigh.

Inej nearly laughed at that.

A girl named for mercy, found in a place where Inej had shown none.

She guessed the gods were trying to send her a message, wondered if it was a joke or a warning or a reminder.

“My parents are dead.”

It wasn’t a question, but she answered it anyway. Better ugly truths than pretty lies.

“We went to the place your Caravan had been. The slavers left none alive.”

Kripa closed her eyes, her face collapsing into lines of sorrow. When she opened them, it seemed as though she had aged another fifty years in a moment’s passing.

“What did you do to the slavers?”

Inej looked at the Kripa, her gaze unshakable and unrepentant. She could feel the slavers’ blood as it splashed across her face, could hear the quiet thunk of her saints as she buried them in necks and chests and eye sockets.

“I left none alive.”

Kripa was quiet for a long moment before she nodded. Tears streamed down her face, but her eyes were far away and unseeing.  

“Good.”

* * *

He read her note for a third time in a row, the two lines chasing themselves endless through his mind.

_I should be back in Ketterdem in two weeks, gods willing._

He needed to send a runner to the harbor. He needed to pay some sad street urchin good coin to wait at her berth. He needed to compile all the information he’d gathered on the slavers and the pleasure houses while she’d been away these last six months.

He needed to do something other than stare at the second sentence on the paper.

It was slanted and trailing, a creeping ink blot at the end of it. The ink thin with haste, then gathered with hesitation.

It should not cause his heart to knock in his chest. It should not settle heavily in his veins.

It should not exist for monsters like him.

He reached out and trailed his fingers over the words. Needed to convince himself that he hadn’t dreamt them up. At his touch, he felt them slide up his arms and settle into the cracks of his heart.

_I miss you._


	2. From next to you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He forced his eyes open and grounded himself in the dark swirl of her irises. Slowly, steadily, he moved his eyes over her face, mapping the edges of her features with his gaze - the low slope of her nose, the broad sweep of her eyelashes, the gentle curve of her lips. He imagined himself tracing over the path with his fingertips. The water dropped to his ankles.  
> \--------  
> Inej returns.

He kept her last letter tucked into the inner pocket of his jacket. Had to force himself not to constantly tap its place near his heart, a false signal to pickpockets as to where his valuables might be.

He knew it was the worst kind of sentiment to keep it close to him. Its proximity wouldn’t bring her faster, only seemed to heighten his longing for her. Still, he kept it close to him, a still second heart that anchored him to feelings foreign and extraordinary.

He never even took it out to read. The two simple sentences were tattooed on the inner edges of vision. He could see them every time he closed his eyes to sleep at night.

* * *

The lights of Ketterdam flashed in the distance, a sinking city held aloft by Grisha will and mercher greed. Inej stared at them and tried to tease apart what they meant to her.

Ketterdam had never felt like home to her. It had been a gilded jail and a den of monsters. It had been a site of rebirth and reunion.

It was a place of malice and miracles, guarded by a dark-eyed boy who had delivered both with his elegant trickster hands.

She closed her eyes, saw the words that had spilled from her in a fit of bravery:

_I miss you._

She pictured Kaz reading them and tried to imagine the look that passed over his features. She wondered if she might see it in person if she said them aloud to him.

* * *

He woke up abruptly, a low buzz of want in his veins.

Instinctively, foolishly, he looked over to the window. Knew he’d only see cold moonlight streaming in through the glass.

Except he didn’t.

Sitting on the edge of his window, swathed in moonlight and carrying the scent of the sea, was Inej. She was completely still, but somehow managed to give the impression of motion. He felt like she might disappear completely if he moved too suddenly or breathed too loudly and wanted too much.

He stared at her for a long, electric moment; wondered if he had somehow dreamt her into being with the force of his longing.

“You’re here,” he said stupidly, the coarse scrub of his voice ground down further with sleep. He sat up straighter. “I didn’t expect you for another three days.”

She tilted her head at him, the action so familiar and missed that he nearly smiled.

“Should I come back in three days then?”

He glared at her, his eyes narrowing fiercely. It was a look that could send his biggest brawlers cowering; Inej simply stared at him, a smile playing across her lips.

“It doesn’t really work when your hair looks like that, Kaz.”

His glare faltered. He considered trying to flatten the tangled strands that stood up in the back. A greater, more insistent part pushed him towards Inej, pressed him to make sure she was not just the newest torture concocted by an absent god.  

He unfolded his long limbs from the bed and walked over to her.

He stretched out his hand, pale fingers curved out towards her. He almost expected her to disappear, thought he might wake up gasping and bitter in the tangled sheets of his bed.

Instead, she reached out and let her hand hover over his, a hummingbird in flight. She slowly rested her hand over his and he immediately wrapped his long fingers around her own, his grip firm even as a tremor ran through him.

She shifted from the window sill and let her hand go slack in his own, as though expecting him to let go. Another tremor passed through him, stronger than the last. He forced himself to keep his grip on her, simply closed his eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath.

The water was up to his waist, the harbor tide pulling him away from her. He let another shiver roll through him as he flexed his fingers open, slowly slid his hand along the underside of her palm until the tips of two fingers came to rest on the pulsepoint at her wrist. The frenetic beat of her heart dragged him back to the present, helped to keep the pull of the harbor from pulling him under. The water stopped its creeping climb and drained back down to his knees.

He forced his eyes open and grounded himself in the dark swirl of her irises. Slowly, steadily, he moved his eyes over her face, mapping the edges of her features with his gaze - the low slope of her nose, the broad sweep of her eyelashes, the gentle curve of her lips. He imagined himself tracing over the path with his fingertips. The water dropped to his ankles.

He looked down at her hand wrapped in his own. Kept his fingers on her pulse point as he shifted his hand, his thumb resting lightly on the dents of her wrists.

 _It’s not a dream,_ he thought as he idly traced nonsense patterns on her skin with the edge of his thumb.    
 _It’s not a dream,_ he repeated as he felt her pulse jump under the pressure of his fingertips.

The water receded to his feet, the pull of the tide gone for the moment. He let out a breath, measured and even, as he dragged his gaze back up to meet hers. A dozen different phrases crowded in the back of his throat ready to be spoken.

Then, she smiled, swift and glittering like sunlight breaking through a cloudy day. Suddenly all that he might have said retreated back, only to be overtaken by a different statement entirely. The words crawled from the cracks in his heart and leapt from the unsteady set of his lips.

“I missed you,” he murmured, the rough grain of his voice softened by moonlight.

Her breath caught and her eyes widened. A smile - wide and bright and more than he deserved - bloomed across her face. He needn’t have died for it after all, but a part of him felt resurrected anyway.

* * *

Somewhere, a distant bell tolled twice.

Inej felt Kaz’s hand twitch. He didn’t let go of her, though, simply shifted his hand until it was once again wrapped around her own. He let their clasped hands drop between them and looked up at her, his liquid gaze dark and searching.

“Are you staying at Wylan’s?”

She hesitated, then nodded.

“I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.” She lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. “He doesn’t know I’m back yet. I came straight here after we docked.”

Truthfully, she hadn’t known what had been her plan as she’d leapt across the roofs of Ketterdam. She hadn’t even realized how late it was - had simply driven herself forward by imagining Kaz’s surprised expression. She had never managed to sneak up on him since their first meeting. She had felt almost giddy at the thought that this might be a rare opportunity to succeed.

Instead, she had been the one surprised. She’d found a rumpled, sleepy Kaz - a boy who reached for her first, without armor of any kind; a boy with gentle touches and an admission of reflected longing.

“Inej,” he said, the rough burn of his voice bringing her out of her musing. She looked up at him and watched as he licked his lips, an almost nervous bent to the motion. “You can -. You can stay here.” She tilted her head at him, confused. He’d given her room away in the first week after their final job together. There was no room for her in the cramped space of The Slat. She opened her mouth to say as much when he shook his head, then swallowed thickly. “With me, I mean. If you want.”

She breathed in sharply, an odd hum of emotion settling across her nerves. She looked at Kaz - his simple grey shirt and loose black pants, hair a twisted mess that fell over half his face, feet and fingers bare. And now, an invitation to stay. She felt like she was living someone else’s life. It was intimate in its ordinariness, spoke of a closeness that once seemed impossible.

But didn’t she already know that miracles were possible?

“Ok,” she replied, her voice steady and sure.

A look that might’ve been surprise passed over his face, then slipped away before she could study it. He nodded and walked towards the bed, letting her hand slip from his. She followed him after a moment’s hesitation and sat on the edge of the bed. Kaz stood at the head of the bed, seemed to look anywhere but her as she took off her shoes and shrugged out of her jacket and tunic. She reached up to hair, running her hands down the long braid. She considered unraveling the strands, then decided against - it would simply take too long and Kaz was standing off to the side of her, a thrumming kind of energy radiating off of him that made her feel warm and unsteady.

She looked up at him as she moved her hands from her braid. An expression that might have been disappointment, looked faintly like longing lingered on the edges of Kaz’s dark eyes at the motion. Before she could look too closely at it, he turned away from her and tossed an extra pillow to the far side of the bed. She gripped the edge of the mattress and pushed herself back towards the wall. He waited until she’d crawled underneath the sheets before settling down next to her, his lean body on top of the sheets, eyes staring up ahead of him. There was a sharp, unrecognizable look on his face. If she didn’t know better, she might describe it as worry. She turned onto her side, one hand tucked underneath her, the other resting in the space between them. She traced the fine lines of his features - the thin press of his lips, the sharp angle of his jawline.

“Kaz,” she said quietly, waited for him to turn and look at her. “I missed you, too.”

He released a long, slow breath, the tension draining from his body. The sharp lines of his face softened - became less hooded, more boyish. He nodded and turned to face her, both hands tucked beneath his head. For a moment, he looked as young as he was never allowed to be. It left her strangely breathless.

He stared at her intently, his eyes the color of a storm at sea. She could see him working through something in his mind. 

“I was hoping to see the pirate hat.”

An unexpected laugh burst from her. Kaz’s eyes seems to glitter at the sound of it. **  
**

“I’ll bring it tomorrow. It’s not exactly made for skulking around on dark rooftops.”

He nodded, an easy, pleased look on his face.

“Tell me about your journey,” he rasped out after a quiet moment.

“You’ve read my letters, Kaz.”

“But I haven’t heard it from you.”

* * *

She smiled at that.

He pressed the expression into the vault of his mind, a valuable that only became more precious as his collection grew.

Inej spoke and he let her voice wash over him like a baptism, her words a revival of all he’d tried to keep from dampened and controlled in her absence. She spoke and he imagined her standing at the bow of her ship, pictured her hair sweeping out behind her in the sea air, saw her climbing up the mast and standing on edge of the crow’s nest.

He let her voice tether him to reality, the water staying below the edges of the bed. He moved a hand out from under him and rested it in the space between them, let the back of his fingers brush against hers. Slowly, by half-inches, he moved his hand against hers, shifted his fingers until they were intertwined with hers. He let out a breath and reveled in the softness of her hands, the warmth of her fingertips.

“You haven’t said anything about your many successes,” he said as she paused to fight back a yawn. “I heard rumors of two slaver ships lost at sea.”

A warring expression of pride and something approaching grief crossed her face.

“It was three, actually.”

He raised his eyebrow at her.

She was quiet. He waited, watched as anger and sadness slid over her features.  

“We came upon a slaver ship taking shelter in a cove north of Lutsk. We couldn’t take them in open water - their ship was nearly twice the size of ours - so we waited until nightfall to attack. We found…” She went quiet and still, seemed to disappear into herself. “I fought until my knives were too slick to hold. Once we freed the prisoners, I burned the entire ship. I waited on the shore until morning. I waited until there was nothing left.”

“Do you regret it?” He asked, the jagged scrape of his voice seeming to bring her back to the present.

“No.” A steady, unflinching answer, though he could feel an undercurrent of unease under it. At what she’d done? Or for what she might become once it was gone?

He pressed his fingers into the dips between her knuckles.

“What did you find?”

“Two Suli girls were already dead when we boarded - tossed aside like garbage.” She shivered though not, he noted, from cold. “In the captain’s quarters, we found a third girl - younger than I’d been when I was taken.” Her eyes were fierce and fighting, then sad and exhausted in the next moment. “I took her to my parents. A daughter to replace the one who can never really come home.” There was brief, bitter rent to her mouth that slipped away when she shook her head. “They can help her heal and to protect her. And I’ll protect them all in whatever ways I can.”

“She’s fortunate to have someone to protect her. Loneliness after loss can turn people into monsters.”

There, in her wide, brown eyes, he could see the question once more: _was there no one else to protect you?_

Instead of answering it, he simply focused on the press of her fingers against his skin. He looked up at her as he traced his thumb up the edges of her hand.

“You should sleep.”

“And you?”

He shrugged.

She sighed and drew her hand away from him, her features shuttering closed.

“The bastard of the barrel doesn’t need sleep?”

He was quiet for a long moment. Suddenly and painfully as a lightning strike, he knew what he needed. He needed her to return again, needed to give her a reason to.  

“I’m not,” he finally answered, glancing over at her from the corner of his eye. There was a furrow between her dark brows that he wanted to smooth with his lips. He turned away from her and closed his eyes instead. “I don’t remember my mother - she died giving birth to me. Jordie used to say I looked like her. He took after our father.” He felt the bed shift and opened his eyes to look at Inej. She had moved onto her side to study him, a look of concentration on her face. Slowly, she lifted her hand and reached up to sweep the hair away from his face. He felt her fingertips brush his forehead and nearly shivered. Not from phantom disgust or creeping dread, but from a hot spike of want.   

She let her hand drift down and tangled their fingers together once more. He watched as her eyes flitted over his features, wondered what puzzle she was piecing together in her mind.

“I remember my father,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper in the dark. “He was a giant - or seemed like it, at least. It felt like I strained my neck every time I looked him in the eye. He was strong, too. Not just farm strong, like Jesper, but strong enough to rip boulders out of the ground and bring down thick tree branches.” He breathed out, long and slow. “He wasn’t strong enough to keep the plow from splitting him open, though.”  

Just as Jordie hadn’t been strong enough to protect them both from the claws of the city.

He closed his eyes, then. There was a burning behind them that was unrecognizable, seemed to belong to another boy, another life, another world.

“I’m sorry, Kaz.”

He breathed in deeply. Something in him felt scraped open and raw, but in a way that didn’t ache like it used to. Inej had held his life and his shame and now his past. He didn’t feel lighter or less burdened, but as if he’d finally stepped onto steady ground after years shifting, sinking sands.

“It was a long time ago.”

“Still. I’ll pray him. For all of you.”

He opened his eyes and looked at her, the moonlight illuminating the soft edges of her face. Once he would’ve told her that he didn’t need her prayers. Perhaps that was still true. But he also was aware of a larger, stronger truth: he could now not reject anything she offered to him. There was a gate within him that he could no longer bar when it came to her. He no longer wanted to.

He unwound his fingers from hers. Then, reached over and traced the contours of her braid with his fingertips.  

“Will you sleep now?”

“If you will.”

He huffed quietly, then nodded.

“Sleep, Inej.”

She closed her eyes, her breathing evening out almost immediately. After a long moment, so did his.

His dreams were still filled with her. Only instead of fragments and scraps of her, she stood in front of him, whole and smiling. His dream self smiled at her and reached for her - careless and free. Somehow, he knew it was a dream. And yet, he also knew he would wake and find her beside him, real and awake and palpable.

Perhaps the gods existed after all.


End file.
